The most striking image in “12 Years a Slave”—a film of many powerful moments and sequences—is of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freeborn African-American kidnapped into slavery, hanging from a tree with a noose around his neck and one foot touching the muddy ground. Behind him, other slaves go about their labors—it’s a normal day on a Louisiana plantation in the eighteen-forties. Solomon was almost hanged for defending himself against an overseer; now he’s left to dangle, halfway between stability and annihilation. That’s essentially his situation for a dozen long years. The movie is based on a true story, which Northup told in a book of the same title, published in 1853. Born in the Adirondack Mountains in 1807, he becomes a violinist, and lives a gracious life (which we see) with his wife and children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Then a couple of top-hatted circus gents offer him a job playing on tour, and, one night in Washington, D.C., they get him drunk. When he wakes up in the morning, he’s in chains, in a foul hole. As he’s taken out of the city by slavers, the director, Steve McQueen, raises the camera to reveal the Capitol in the distance. After a journey by ship, Solomon winds up on plantations in Louisiana, where he’s traded, loaned out, and, at one point, used as service for debt. Throughout, he has the enraged consciousness of a free man. Yet he can’t reveal much of his mind or his temperament without incurring the wrath of men and women whose self-esteem is based on the belief that he’s an animal. What remains awake in his soul of a better life puts the moral condition of slavery in the harshest possible light.
“12 Years a Slave” is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery. It shows up the plantation scenes of “Gone with the Wind” for the sentimental kitsch that they are, and, intentionally or not, it’s an artist’s rebuke to Quentin Tarantino’s high-pitched, luridly extravagant “Django Unchained.” For McQueen, who comes out of the London gallery-and-museum world of short films and videos, the movie is an enormous step forward. “Hunger” (2008), his first feature, was a kind of sacerdotal monument to Bobby Sands and other I.R.A. prisoners who staged a hunger strike. The movie, which starred Michael Fassbender, was marked by a fetishistic absorption in beatings, self-denial, the disintegration of the body. His next feature, “Shame” (2011), also starring Fassbender, was a sexually explicit folly about the utter hell of being a single, straight, handsome, well-employed young white male in New York. Both movies were staged as austere rituals. But now McQueen has opened himself up to society, history, and narrative. There are expertly composed short scenes set in Saratoga and at various slave-trading posts on the journey to Louisiana. McQueen and his screenwriter, John Ridley, might have done more with the minor characters that Northup encounters—Paul Giamatti as a fussy slave broker, Alfre Woodard as a cynical plantation mistress—but they move on fast.
Northup’s kindly but hapless first owner, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), protects him for a while, but is forced to pass him to the sadistic Edwin Epps (Fassbender). At Epps’s plantation, crested by a large house with columns, Solomon gets caught in an anguished sexual tangle involving Epps; his beautiful field slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o); and his calculating wife, Mary (Sarah Paulson). The filmmakers drive the scenes toward a frenzy of humiliation, loathing, and savage beatings. McQueen spares us nothing of the horror of human dignity betrayed by base everyday cruelty. If there’s a weakness in these scenes, it’s a reliance on the mesmerizing Fassbender. Epps is so far gone into psychosis that there’s nothing Fassbender can do but repeat his outbursts with greater hysteria. For a while, the movie becomes a redundant moral and physical struggle between a noble, forbearing African-American and a white madman.
Yet there are scenes and shots staged and photographed with such sober beauty that I will never forget them: in Washington, the men and women about to be shipped south, standing naked in a yard and washing themselves; the dripping woods and the languor of Louisiana in summer; Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face—square jaw, furrowed brow, eyes appalled by a situation in which Solomon is forbidden to demonstrate exactly what, in his own eyes, makes him a man. Northup is a gentleman of mild disposition, easy to like; anyone who has ever feared losing everything will identify with him. But the movie leaves us grieving for the thousands who never knew freedom, who were never able to tell their stories for future generations.
This fall season, human adventure and daring in all its natural glory circles the globe and even beyond. (Comic-book heroes, for the moment, seem to be nesting, in disconnected bits, waiting to rise again.) There’s “Gravity,” with Sandra Bullock dangling above the beautiful Earth; “Captain Phillips,” with Tom Hanks trying to outfox Somali pirates on the high seas; and now “All Is Lost,” with Robert Redford as a lonely yachtsman drifting around the Indian Ocean. “All Is Lost”—the title is a line from a farewell letter that Redford’s character writes—echoes such literary classics as Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” But “All Is Lost,” which was written and directed by J. C. Chandor, is unimaginable as anything but a movie. It’s largely wordless, sombrely spectacular, vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed attention for a tight hundred minutes. We know nothing about this weathered man in his sailboat—a thirty-nine-foot yacht—and we never learn anything about him, except that he likes to be alone on very long trips. “I think you would all agree that I tried,” he writes, presumably to his family, in the movie’s prologue. “I will miss you. I’m sorry.” The time frame then skips back eight days. As the sailor sleeps in his cabin, the absurd crashes into his life: a floating steel shipping container, which apparently slipped off the deck of a passing freighter, makes a hole in the side of his craft. The container is carrying sneakers; a few of them dribble into the ocean, a small staple of consumerism impinging on a solitary man in the middle of nowhere.
Philosophers speak generally of that able fellow homo faber, man the creator. Redford (as I’ll call him; the sailor has no name) is both homo faber and homo fixit. His navigation equipment and his radio are rendered useless, and he is seventeen hundred miles south of the sea lane known as the Sumatra Straits, where he hopes he can be rescued. He sets about patching the hole in his boat, pasting large strips of plastic over the opening, caulking the edges—making his yacht seaworthy. And then, sextant in hand, he heads for the straits. The boat is assailed by weather and every kind of misfortune, and Redford grows increasingly battered and hungry. Chandor, who demonstrated a vivid talent for dialogue, mood, and characterization in the Wall Street meltdown movie “Margin Call” (2011), here displays an ability to furiously carve up and then integrate a confined space. Redford, working every corner of his boat, takes us back to the Inuit hunter Nanook, in Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922), methodically cutting a hole in the ice to catch a seal. The continuity of activity in sustained shots is the essence of the drama. All around the man occupied in his yacht, the gray open sea is either still or swollen. Enormous storms flip the boat, and Chandor evokes the strangeness of shipwreck—the boat, hull in the air, gets righted by another giant wave. As often as he can, he creates an aura of mystery within the extreme materiality of his fiction. Why does Redford shave as a possibly fatal storm strikes the yacht? We can only guess that he wants to exert control in the maelstrom any way he can.
Apart from Robert Redford, water is the major actor here, sloshing, slopping, pouring, swelling, cascading. Redford sleeps in it, squats in it, walks through it, swims under it. The film wouldn’t have been as moving with a man of, say, George Clooney’s age; it wouldn’t have had the nobility of endurance to the same degree. Now seventy-seven, Redford is in great shape, and the cheekbones and the jaw, despite a wrinkled shell, have held up—a visual sign of character surmounting age. He does more acting in this movie than he has done in all his earlier movies combined. The anxiety in his eyes as death approaches is unsettling, since it may be something that Redford the man feels, too. His movements become more spasmodic as the character grows weaker, but he’s still quick and capable. At one point, Chandor gives us a heroic image of the sailor at the helm of his craft in the middle of the storm. Heroic, but not hollowly iconic. The movie is too busy attending to Redford’s next task. This is not a contemplative film, even though it (inevitably) asks: What does your existence mean? The answer: You make meaning by doing. ♦